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Err.... not quite. What you're describing is preferential attachment... ie., those with a large stake can multiply that stake producing ever larger amounts. Th
by mjburgess 5y ago
Err.... not quite. What you're describing is preferential attachment... ie., those with a large stake can multiply that stake producing ever larger amounts.
This isn't a scam. If I give everyone in the comments $100k, by "next year" some will have $1m and some $0 -- and, in general, we'll all be a little better off.
Its the nature of any advantage that it compounds, and compounding advantages of any kind produce dramatic inequalities (of sex, money, creative achievement, etc.).
Bitcoin isnt a scam because it produces an unequal outcome -- any system which works to increase the general welfare will necessarily operate on and compound inequalities.
It's a scam because as time passes the general welfare *does not increase*, indeed, it plummets!
People holding coins arent opening factories, building houses, teaching people, etc. Nothing is happening. They're litterally just twiddling their thumbs.
What's actually happening is that poorer fools are joining late in the game, whose money comes from actual labour... and supply the initial parasitical early-stakes with exit-cash. Ie., they wait for 10yr do nothing; you work for 1mo and do lots. Your productive labour becomes their exit. It's welfare for the rich.
Inequality isnt the issue here. It's the particular type of "theft" taking place. It is, in a very real sense, an actual scam.
- shuckles 5y agoWell in fairness some Bitcoin holders are building vast factories of mining capacity, and their argument is the mining is spent on pro-social anti-authoritarian censorship-free wealth movement. Other Bitcoin holders are putting in a lot of labor to create the most compelling narrative of a genuine rags to riches opportunity. Is there $5t or whatever in total market value to that? Not sure.
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoHow does that differ at all from the possession of any sparse, shelf-stable commodity that is in demand? For example, gold or palladium. An individual possessing palladium in the past 10 years would have seen a 400% increase in value. The people holding the metal aren't doing anything, it's just demand for it has increased and the value of fiat has decreased over time, so it is worth more. The same could be said for video games or pokemon cards. I guess maybe the argument is you can do something with metals or video games or pokemon cards. But it's hard to believe that a special Charizard has a utility permitting million dollar valuations.
- ansible 5y agoThere is hopefully no one out there that genuinely believes that a Charizard card is actually worth anything other than for entertainment. People are apparently willing to pay a lot for said entertainment, and the cachet of owning a rare card. And that's fine. Palladium is a genuinely useful material, and has significant industrial uses. If it gets expensive, that's just markets. If it gets too expensive, alternatives will be researched and hopefully developed. And that is fine. Crypto fraudsters are trying to tell us that their coin is legitimately useful for ... something, while it is actually an entertainment product. In my view, Doge is one of the few legit crypto coins because it was initially marketed as entertainment. People would donate Doge to each other for fun. Some of the file storage coins may also be legitimate, because you spend those on distributed storage, which is an actually useful service. But the majority of crypto coins and NFTs are marketed as something useful or a legitimate investment, when they are not.
- quickcheque 5y agoIt is kind of interesting to look at bitcoin as part of the 'virtual colonization'. Much of big tech can be said to colonize the data of its users...